September 08, 2014

once upon a time, google was have a desktop search solution for win32 based systems. i can't remember maybe at 2007~2008. it was allows you index and search your local files as google search interface.

after the new index feature of windows vista, they're abandoned the project but windows indexer doesn't have not all features of their engine. for example year is 2014, microsoft released windows 8.1 and still have no portable drive support. if you eject drive and jack into another usb port, all metadata is become obsolete. also index process 7/24 working in background even playing games, watching 4K videos etc. that's causes performance drops in system.

Whatever, two months ago i have a lot of spare time and decided to rebuilt their web based local indexer from scratch. it's easy in theory but requires a lot of legwork. then decided to create it as php script. that will allow us faster development, quick upgrades and more flexibility.

Technical Background First of all, implemented an embedded webserver into judith. she's already accepting web api calls for mail & skype notifications, just added few lines extra code. then started to develop a lite version of "C.A.I.N" it's a codeigniter based web application engine which i'm using it in almost all commercial projects.

Indexer project has two controller: one of them building a disk structure and writing them into a portable sqlite database, other controller is showing the search results visually.

Third step is a custom browser, that's necessary to launch huge inputboxes and show results in a multi-monitor setup. used chromium as web render engine. i already did few experiments with it before, that was the easy part.

and rest of maintenance and indexer scripts automatically launching after 5min of idle, adding new files to database and removing the entries of deleted files. Currently this setup is still a prototype, i will share the project sources after it's become stable.